Chapter 6

Sidetrack (i)

Space Cadet - You're GO for TLI NASA Pixabay Image

Chapter 6

SPACE CADET ‘You’re Go for TLI’

Take our camper van. Fill it with enough food and water for a week. Pack a couple of suits, a radio, and an antique computer and don’t forget to include the user manuals. Check there are no leaks around the windows and doors, that it’s got full tanks of fuel and water, and that the bikes required for tootling around at the destination are securely fastened on the tow bar. Now hook it to a crane, hoist it 110 metres into the air and attach it to the tip of three metal cylinders balanced one on top of the other and weighing a total of 3500 tonnes; each one completely filled with highly explosive mix of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

Ask around for three volunteers to drive it, making sure they’ve had at least a year or two of training and maybe done a couple of loops around the neighbourhood in a smaller vehicle. Like in a retro Reality TV Show allow cameras to follow their every move for the preceding weeks before strapping them into the van and locking the doors. Don’t forget to advise them that it’s the first time this new vehicle has been tried with people aboard, the insurance doesn’t cover the trip and there’s no breakdown service. As they gaze out of the window, admiring the view before they set off, you can boost their confidence by mentioning that the majority of the guys and girls entrusted with their safety are only a few years out of college. Oh and it might be worth reminding them that the trip is costing the tax-payer $25 billion, about 5% of the nation’s public spending, the equivalent of ten times that amount today and roughly equal to the cost to the UK of the NHS in 2021.

Take aim at the distance silver ball in the night sky, earth’s orbiting companion for the last four billion years; it’s only 380,000 kilometres and three days away. (Actually take aim at where it will be in 3 days time). Punch the coordinates into a rudimentary SatNav but just check that the slide-rule and sextant have been packed as a back-up.

Now light the touch-paper and stand back, stand at least 10km back, cross your fingers and cover your ears.

‘5-4-3-Engines running-1……Lift off. We have lift-off… The Saturn V has cleared the tower taking Apollo 8 on its way to the moon.’ December 22 1968.

Am I the only person who, whenever I look at the moon, can’t help thinking ‘people have flown there and walked on the surface?’ It’s over fifty years ago and I’ve been looking at it most nights ever since with exactly the same thoughts and they haven’t been diluted over time. It might be harder now to convey the sense of excitement and anticipation felt by a nine-year-old boy eagerly awaiting the next ‘BBC 1 - Apollo Special Bulletin', and the hourly update on the radio news. Easier to recall is the sense of awe. In fact, over the decades, this feeling, rather than waning, has continued to grow. How the hell did they manage it? What balls! What confidence! And all with technology that was still largely in the analogue Dark Ages, a decade before digital solutions arrived to increase the possibilities.

Let’s try and blend that boy’s thrilling experiences from those few short years with the more considered, but equally as inspiring, reflections of his sixty-year-old self. For this ‘mission report’ we’ll need our time machine again, programmed to revisit the late sixties and able to intercept radio transmissions between the guys in the camper van and their controllers back in the garage.

Before Apollo 8, I’d only slowly been gaining awareness of the unfolding space programme. Like most boys, I knew who Yuri Gagarin was, I’d heard of Jon Glenn, Sputnik and Telstar (or was that just the Shadows version?), and I knew men had walked in space and three had died in a fire whilst testing on the pad in early 1967. My mind was already open to the possibility of people leaving planet earth. On the telly, Fireball XL5, piloted by Scott Zodiac with his crew of Robert the Robot and Venus, the doctor, patrolled the cosmos of 2062. Closer to home, Alan Tracey would blast off in Thunderbird 3 from a secret island base to deal with any threats to earth emerging from beyond our atmosphere, often alerted to the danger by his brother who was manning the orbiting space station Thunderbird 5. And the Beeston library was a source for some interesting reading material found in a newly discovered section labelled ‘Science Fiction;’ the Narnia Chronicles were passed onto Jackie to make way on the bookshelf for their Martian equivalent.

I knew there was a plan to get an American on the moon before the bad guy Soviets and, as the decade progressed, information started to emerge of how it might be done. Speculative artistic impressions of a lunar lander perched on a rugged moonscape, the crew in the foreground, conducting some geological experiments, were increasingly appearing in magazines and comics, whilst popular quasi-scientific programmes like Tomorrow’s World or Horizon occasionally provided rudimentary graphical simulations of how it might be achieved. And my cousin David, Joan and Ted Mills’ eldest boy and a year younger than me, was a space and science-fiction nut. His bedroom was covered in posters and he knew loads more than me about what was going on. Whenever we visited I’d try to interrogate him about the latest developments. He wasn’t in the least bothered about sport so at least we had this in common to chat about.

By Christmas ’68 I was ready for the first ‘big one;’ I wasn’t the only one. The USA had experienced an awful year. Huge losses in Vietnam triggering further anti-war demonstrations, race riots across many states, political violence at the Democrat Convention in Chicago, and the assassinations of Martin Luther-King and Robert Kennedy had all painted a picture of a nation divided. Harsh Jimi Hendrix guitar, doom-laden Doors’ lyrics and a plethora of protest songs provided the background soundtrack for an uncertain and divided society. They really needed something to lift the mood.

NASA, behind in its declared programme, over-spent on its vast budget, and conscious of a rumour that the USSR was within weeks of aiming for the moon, made a brave decision. They scrubbed the original plan for Apollo 8 which called for more earth orbit testing and declared that the next flight would go straight to the moon and back. The crew had only three months to re-train and were offered the chance to stick with their original flight plan or ‘go for it’ on the new mission; being made of the ‘Right Stuff’ they obviously opted for the moon trip.

At lunchtime on Saturday 21st December the countdown was underway, the launch being covered from the BBC Apollo studio anchored by James Burke and Cliff Michelmore with the astronomical input provided by the ebullient Patrick Moore. It would be touch and go for me. I had to leave for the Cubs’ Christmas Party at 2pm so any hold on the count would be potentially disastrous. Fortunately, the monster Saturn V blasted off on schedule, performing flawlessly on its debut flight, each stage delivering its share of the thrust required to lift the huge contraption into space, and just eight minutes later the world’s biggest ever rocket had deposited the three astronauts in earth orbit just as my lift to the party turned up outside. Playing beanbag football, trying to rumble the magician and tucking into the bangers, beans and mash brought me back to earth for the next two hours. Meanwhile 200km above our heads, travelling around the earth at 29,780 km/hr the crew of Borman, Lovell and Anders, also had the same two hours to contemplate their momentous next step.

They didn’t have to do much; just press a button on the console and hold it in for 318 seconds and they’d become the fastest humans ever, the highest humans ever, (relative to the earth that is). Some clever young sparks back on the ground at Mission Control (catch the film ‘Hidden Figures’) had calculated that the van needed to accelerate to exactly 38,959 km/hr to escape earth’s gravitational pull, to be able to head off in right direction to intercept a moving moon and be captured by its gravity. To achieve this the third stage engine need to burn for exactly 318 seconds. How on earth does anyone work that out? Even with a computer to help, it needs a certain mindset to understand the geometry and physics.

And what sort of a mindset does it need to point your little ship away from your home port, weigh anchor and set sail into the unknown? The Pacific Islanders, the medieval mariners, and the Victorian naval explorers would all have known that mixture of fear and excitement. Now, in 1968, for the first time in human history, people were leaving the relative comfort of planet earth’s gravity and heading outwards into Deep Space and, in nothing bigger than a camper van.

As the moment approached, Dad and I had a minor dilemma: watch the Apollo update or watch the football results. In the end we opted for the radio for the football (Forest 3 - Ipswich 2) and watched the BBC as James Burke told us which key words to listen for and how long the burn would last. When it happened it was typical of NASA: understated and almost lost in the continual dialogue of acronyms and jargon.

Michael Collins, soon to be in the crew of Apollo 11, was the CapCom in Houston and, after the various mission control specialists gave their individual ‘go’s’, he relayed the message.

‘Apollo 8. You’re Go for TLI.’ Lovell pressed the button and 318 seconds later they were on the way to the moon.

TLI stands for trans-lunar-ingression: three odd words of jargon to herald the first ever cutting of the ties that bind humanity to our planet.

A day later, as they ‘climbed’ away from earth and neared the point where they would begin to ‘fall’, pulled by the moon’s gravity, the crew were the able to see the earth in their window, visible now as a whole globe. Oddly they were flying backwards, unable to see the moon looming ever larger in their non-existent rear-view mirror and trusting on their star-sightings and the computers for the correct trajectory. This reverse approach was to ensure the engine on the van was correctly aligned to fire and slow them down, just enough to be captured by the moon’s gravity and end up in orbit. This manoeuvre (LOI - Lunar Orbit Insertion) had to be performed perfectly; get it wrong, not slowing down enough, and they’d have been whipped around the moon and hurled out into deeper space by the gravitational sling-shot. Slow down too much and it would be a fight to avoid crashing into the moon. And, just to add some extra spice, the actual burn of 4 minutes 11 seconds had to be done, due to orbital mechanics, on the Dark Side of the Moon, completely out of radio contact with everyone on earth, in a place never, ever seen before.

Over lunch on Christmas Eve, we held our breath listening to the radio commentary. Half an hour earlier, the little van, now only 112km above the lunar surface, had disappeared round the back and into radio silence. If we were anxious, absent-mindedly eating our ham, egg and chips, just think what it was like for the guys in the Mission Control garage or the astronauts in the van who really, really needed that engine to work. Was there ever any doubt in their minds that someone might have got the sums wrong, that the burn time required wasn’t exactly 4 minutes and 11 seconds, or did they harbour any vague, unexpressed, concerns that for some silly reason the clock might stop ticking or imagine a multitude of other what-if disaster scenarios?

The calculations were correct: a hiss of static and some typical laconic NASA banter accompanied Apollo 8’s reappearance from around the back, safely in orbit, with the moon now filling their window. They didn’t stay that long: just twenty hours, ten orbits. Long enough to view the pock-marked, meteor impacted grey surface at close quarters. Long enough to see for the first time one of the most beautiful sights anywhere in our universe; the iconic ‘Earthrise’. I wonder, as they swung around the far side on the final orbit, how nervous they were. Again the engine had to fire for the right duration, again when out of contact on the far side, to propel them out of lunar orbit and back in the direction of Earth.

Sometimes I get a bit concerned on a cold or damp morning, especially when I’ve got to get somewhere, that the car might not start. Imagine trusting in an engine that’s already travelled 380,000 km through the frozen wastes of space, even if it did work okay the first time a few hours earlier. If it coughed, spluttered and failed to start, the crew wouldn’t just be late for an appointment, they’d be marooned in orbit until the oxygen ran out, fatally teased every two hours by the blue ball of Earth rising over the lunar surface.

Of course we were up early to watch the broadcast; it was Christmas morning after all. Present opening was on official hold, not just until grandparents, Harry and Ethel, appeared downstairs, but until Apollo 8 had re-emerged from radio silence and the telemetry had confirmed they were heading home. Lovell broadcast his relief that the engine had fired as the voice communications were re-established. ‘Please be informed there is a Santa Claus’. And I think, aged nine, I still might have believed in him. As they headed earthwards we turned our attention to opening presents and the excitement of Christmas Top of the Pops (‘Lily the Pink’ was number one).

I’ll never understand this. Somehow it’s possible for a tiny camper van to be navigated across 380,000km of nothing, between one massive moving, spinning object and another, even larger one, that’s 40,000 km in diameter, spinning on its axis at 1600km/hr and hurtling through space at 160,000km/hr. Not only that, it can be guided onto the narrow, safe path only a few kilometres wide that it needs to enter at exactly the right angle to avoid burning up or bouncing off the thicker atmosphere and back into space. And then, even more amazingly, it can splashdown in the vast Pacific within a few hundred metres of where the recovery ship is waiting. It’s just a camper van for chrissakes and with only one tank of fuel. How do they do that? I’m okay taking our van to Cornwall and am confident that, with a map and the odd road sign, we’ll end up at the right campsite. The planetary scale and the distances are just mind-blowing but the vehicle size is the same. Just who are these people who understand orbital trajectories? (Again - Check out the film ‘Hidden Figures’)

Two and a half days later we welcomed them back, hurtling down through the atmosphere, entering the radio blackout of re-entry, the TV cameras onboard the carrier and in the chase planes all peering skywards, desperate to catch sight of the three parachutes, or re-establish radio contact with the crew. Most of the nation tuned in to what was to become a familiar colourful sight over the next few years: the battered and scarred capsule, suspended from the three red and white ‘chutes, descending safely on its final few minutes of the mission before landing with a splash in the deep blue waters of the Pacific. Except of course it was all in black and white.

Seven months later, the excitement was cranked up even higher. Apollo 11 was going to attempt a landing. With JFK’s challenging end of decade deadline looming ever closer, NASA had squeezed in two further flights during the first half of 1969, testing the spider-like lunar module in space and continually modifying systems and equipment.

Here’s a thing: I worked in the domestic appliance industry for 35 years and getting any sort of design change into a washing machine or dryer took months. Design, prototyping, cost approval, safety approval, tooling, phase out of existing components, supplier lead time, testing and sign-off at multiple levels across the business. Often frustrating, sometimes costly, it was difficult to co-ordinate without missing something and having the odd hiccup. I felt some responsibility for any changes we implemented in the factory over the years and had the odd sleepless night running through the processes in my head. ‘Have we thought of everything? Has everything been done correctly?’ Contrast this with what NASA faced. These guys weren’t fiddling around with a cooker or fridge, they were working on a 100m tall rocket ship, with kilometres of wiring and pipe work, hundreds of switches, circuit breakers and valves. A mistake with any of the design modifications and the crew, along with the nation’s hopes, could have been blown to smithereens or stranded in space. The pressure to hit timescales was intense. In my environment I could cope with stalling an implementation of a cheaper switch, or an improved user manual, for a month or two. After all, hardly anyone outside the factory would know about it. The NASA management and engineers didn’t have this latitude; what they did have, however, was confidence in each other, a work ethic 100% committed to the mission, suppliers who didn’t dare say ‘no’, and importantly, very deep pockets. Their ability to modify, improve and keep pushing the technology at such a pace was spectacular and hasn’t been surpassed since, certainly not in a peace-time manufacturing setting.

Summer holidays were imminent; Beeston Fields School was in breaking-up mode with the focus on sports day, end-of-term reports and finding out which class we’d be returning to in September. The school television was housed in a wooden cabinet and stood a few feet off the ground so in theory we could all see whilst seated on our little chairs that were lined up in rows in the hall. I don’t think we could have seen much, and most kids were just happy enough to be missing a lesson, but it was exciting to watch the last few minutes of the countdown during the afternoon on Wednesday 16th July and see Apollo 11 blast off, riding its plume of black and white flame into the sky. I’d have raced home for the latest bulletins. Not many kids would have been bothered to know if ‘TLI’ had occurred safely but then, as a veteran of several recent missions, and armed with my Apollo project magazine and pamphlets that had arrived in response to an airmail letter I’d sent to ‘NASA, Cape Kennedy, Florida, USA’ earlier in the year, I was a master of the jargon.

Step by step, James Burke and I tracked their progress. On Saturday evening, Uncle Roger, aged 22 and just a month away from marrying Jill, came round to stay the night and watch events on our telly. It was mid-evening when the lunar module separated from the command module and began its descent to the surface. We kids were allowed to stay up past our usual bedtimes.

The whole descent and landing is covered in numerous accounts, documentaries and books but the ‘13 minutes to the Moon’ podcast tells the story and associated emotions perfectly. Looking back, picking out what was happening from the erratic, static distorted communications was difficult, but there are a few moments where the voice extracts say it all.

To start with they struggled to communicate with Mission Control in Houston; pretty serious because without reliable data and radio signals between the ground and the two spaceships, the landing might have had to be aborted. Now this difficulty doesn’t surprise me; have you ever tried to get a decent Radio 5 signal in mid-Wales or even on the M4 in Wiltshire? I end up flicking between the wavebands or fiddling with the knobs, getting increasingly frustrated whilst Sue is nagging me to concentrate on the road. All they were trying to do was transmit and receive messages across 380,000km, between receiving dishes on the spacecraft no bigger than dustbin lids and half-a-dozen tracking station dishes spread around the earth. One such station, stuck out in the Australian bush, features in the film ‘The Dish’. Another is Jodrell Bank that stands as an icon on the Cheshire plain just east of the M6. And all the time the earth and moon were rotating and the two craft were moving away from each other. Did it bother them? Not a bit. As if they didn’t have anything else on their mind as they flew their machine rapidly down through the lunar sky, they tried rotating the craft to get a better signal, relaying signals via the orbiting command module, and experimented with a different smaller dustbin lid aerial. Eventually they managed to sort something out enabling voice communication to improve and the computers to catch up and synchronise.

The next scare occurred only minutes later, but by this time they were down to 2,900 feet and could see they were in danger of over-shooting the planned landing site. The guidance computer flashed a warning. ‘Program alarm 1202,’ stated Armstrong, calmly but neither he, Aldrin, nor the Flight Director down in Houston, knew what it meant. Mission Control briefly stalled for time, seeking inspiration from the mission specialists staring at their consoles, but, with the alarm continuing to flash, a decision to ‘go’ or ‘abort’ had to be made within a matter of seconds. No pressure then; just the whole world listening and $25 billion riding on it and Armstrong, with a rare tetchy, hint of concern in his voice, repeating his request for Houston to ‘Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.’ I’d have frozen on the spot with the responsibility, but one of the backroom support specialists, 24-year old Jack Garman, managed to recall the alarm code from some recent test notes he’d made and gave his boss, the 'vastly more experienced' 26-year-old guidance systems engineer, Steve Bales, a recommendation to continue. Their call was relayed to the lunar module by Deke Slayton, the CapCom. ‘We’re Go on that alarm’.

Apparently the ‘1202’ message was the poor, hassled, computer telling everyone it was being overloaded with data and had switched to critical process decision-making only. Luckily, the crew hadn’t been filling the computer storage with holiday snaps or pictures of their latest de-hydrated meals, so they had just enough capacity to continue. Back in our lounge on earth, trying to gauge their progress, I don’t think we even realised it had been a potential show stopper.

Descending at an angle of 35 degrees, and losing height at 6 metres per second, they were down to 200 metres when Armstrong took manual control of the spindly-legged bug of a craft, flying across the boulder strewn landscape in an effort to find a suitable spot to land safely. They flew lower, hovering around 20m above the surface, drifting slowly forwards.

Mission Control announced, ’60 seconds.’ James Burke informed his TV audience in a whisper that this was the amount of fuel left before they had to abort.

All we heard was Aldrin effectively saying, ‘Down a bit, left a bit,’ before the next, ominous, unemotional short statement from Houston: ’30 seconds.’ That was it. It wasn’t going to happen.

‘Give it up boys, get home safely’ said Uncle Rog.

Until, unbelievably, Mission Control’s next words: ‘We copy you down, Eagle,’ were followed by Armstrong’s reply: ‘Houston er… Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.’

In Houston they were about to turn blue from holding their breath too long. In Bramcote, Mum, Dad, Uncle Roger, soon-to-be Aunty Jill, and we kids let out a big collective sigh of relief. We had an unwritten ‘no swearing’ policy in our house but I bet the adults were tempted. What a nerve. It wasn’t quite like just making onto the petrol station forecourt in the van with the petrol gauge having been showing red for the last few miles. There had been two billion people tuned in, just like back-seat drivers, willing you find a spot to park before the engine started to splutter.

‘Off to bed kids!’ said Mum.

‘We’ll wake you in time,’ said Dad.

3.00 am. We were back in the lounge. Ghostly black and white images of the lunar surface, a portion of the lunar module and a suit-clad figure jerkily descending a ladder. To be honest the first TV pictures were disappointing but the words were of epic quality.

‘That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’

Just twenty-one hours later, they were ready to leave and faced yet another nerve-wracking moment. While moving around inside the cabin, Aldrin accidentally damaged the switch that would arm the main engine for lift-off from the Moon. There was a concern this would prevent firing the engine, stranding them on the Moon. A high-tech solution was implemented - the top of a felt-tip pen fitted the circuit breaker perfectly. Now all they had to worry about was that the ascent engine would fire. Why wouldn’t it? After all, it had never been ignited before.

It sounds like President Nixon wasn’t as confident as NASA; he had a speech prepared to use in the grim eventuality that Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded. So Sunday evening, straight after returning from our regular trip over to grandparents, Harry and Ethel, for tea, we were yet again listening to a countdown on the BBC. Half-an-hour later, after more hard-to-grasp wonders of orbital navigation, the lunar module and command module were re-united.

‘Okay. Bath time!’ said Mum.

Three days later and the first men on the Moon were home. And then, despite there being another six flights, almost everybody on our planet lost interest in the space programme.

The US Government slashed the budget, forcing NASA to cancel missions. American attention turned to Woodstock and the My Lai massacre. In Britain, just weeks after playing ‘Get Back’ on the roof of the Abbey Road Studios, the headlines were all about The Beatles’ split. I wasn’t happy that the BBC had throttled back on the Apollo mission updates either, even if they were replaced by debut series for Scooby-Doo and Monty Python.

It was only for a brief, tense four days the following April that the world’s attention was re-kindled when Lovell, this time in command of Apollo 13, triggered one of the most amazing rescues ever with his call to Mission Control. ‘Houston. We’ve had a problem.’

The film, the book and the podcast tell the story but they are at a disadvantage: we all know how the story ends. But over those nerve-wracking days, we were again hooked, following developments hour by hour without knowing if the crew could be rescued. I soaked up everything and if James Burke wasn’t clear enough I’d interrogate Dad when he got home from work.

Why couldn’t they just turn round and head back to earth?

They’d have to fire the main engine and it might have been damaged by the explosion. Best to fly on round the moon and use gravity for a free ride home just tweaking the flight path with the engine on the attached lunar module, ‘Aquarius’.

Why have they moved into the lunar module?

They’d lost most of the battery power that supplied electricity to everything in the command module, ‘Odyssey’. If they didn’t save what remained they wouldn’t have enough juice left for re-entry and to open the parachutes.

How else could they save power?

Turn down the heating to barely freezing, turn off most lights and turn off the main computer! Figure out where they were by looking out of the window at a few stars and doing the sums by hand. And they had to do it quickly. Every watt of energy saved increased their survival chances.

Their water supply was a by-product of the battery output. Would they run out?

Ration the crew to 0.6 litres a day.

The carbon-dioxide levels in the cabin were rising dangerously because the filters weren’t running.

‘Dad, what’s CO2 and what’s a ‘scrubber?’

They’ve got to make one out of bits of tape and tubing.

Each morning I’d wake, hoping the BBC would report they were still alive and, by Friday afternoon, there was a chance they could make it. I jumped off the school bus and raced home.

A few hours before finally abandoning Aquarius, their improvised lifeboat, they’d floated back through the docking hatch and back into the icy, darkened command module for the moment of truth. Would the computer boot up? Would the remaining battery have enough power left? Would the switches work?

Condensation had formed everywhere and the risk of an electrical short was high. Can you imagine pressing the ‘on’ button on the computer? If it didn’t work, or stalled at any point, you were shafted. Fortunately the screen lit up in the darkness. A massive relief but that just led to the next challenge. After three days of sleep deprivation, frozen, hungry and thirsty they had to power up the essential command module systems using exactly the emergency recovery sequence proscribed by Houston, and completed with just an hour to spare before it was relayed by voice and copied by frozen fingers onto a notepad. And it wasn’t just a few lines of commands; it covered half-a-dozen pages and nearly 250 sequential steps.

They hit the outer atmosphere, travelling faster than any humans had ever travelled, necessitating a shallow and longer re-entry. The radio blackout lasted forever. Mission Control attempted to contact Odyssey after the usual four minutes but after six minutes there was still no response. Nobody uttered a word, either at the BBC or in our lounge, but I remember, even now, thinking that the heat shield must have failed or the parachutes hadn’t opened and they’d bought it.

We heard it before we saw it. A chase plane reported through crackling static: ‘Visual on Apollo 13 - three ‘chutes deployed’.

Mum cried.

An hour later, looking somewhat haggard, the crew were on board the aircraft carrier as the navy band played ‘The Age of Aquarius’. Whenever I hear this song I don’t think of the musical ‘Hair’ where it originated. I jump immediately in my mind to the tiny lunar module, the first ever space lifeboat.

More than fifty years ago. Amazing.

And since then…..

Visiting Cape Canaveral as tourists in 2003, during the family holiday to Florida, only reinforced the sense of awe at what they’d achieved. Sitting in a mock up command module capsule with the boys, you realise it’s more like a family saloon in size rather than a camper van. And poignantly sitting on the launch pad at the time was the Columbia, which only three weeks later would disintegrate on re-entry, killing the seven crew.

Despite it being less glamorous, less cavalier, ever since then I’ve continued to follow every step although without quite the same ‘mastermind’ special subject focus.

Skylab, the first space station, and the first flight of the Shuttle. The potentially avoidable Challenger explosion which tarnished NASA’s reputation; the Hubble space telescope, eventually generating its stunning images of the universe; the Giotto mission to land a probe on a speeding comet; and the various visits to the planets by robot craft. Even in the last few months, I’ve eagerly tuned in to watch Elon Musk’s Space X programme and look forward to the prospect of a return to the moon in 2025. And over the intervening years, I’ve continued to journey into space in the company of authors Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and numerous others, joined the crew of the Millennium Falcon and USS Enterprise and often wondered if I’ll turn on the news one morning to discover that there’s been a Close Encounter somewhere. Actually there probably already has but the evidence has been locked away by our Government in their X-Files.

I’m not the only one whose enthusiasm has lasted over the years. David Mills, my cousin, followed his boyhood dreams, did a degree in astrophysics, and has been based in Arizona for the last thirty years, working at a huge telescope in the desert. Recently he’s been in charge of a team commissioning a new observatory on a mountain top in Chile that will be capable of looking for planets around stars millions of light years away, or spotting threatening asteroids a few years before they might strike earth.

A final thought.

As a seven year-old, I had delivered each month a comic called ‘Look and Learn’ and one edition featured an article, complete with artist’s impressions, about an unmanned mission to be called the ‘Grand Tour’. Apparently, once in every 165 years, the alignment of the planets was such that, if a craft was launched in the late seventies, it would be able to visit most of the outer planets, using each planet’s gravity to power onto the next one before eventually, decades later, leaving our solar system for ever.

A dozen years after the article in my comic, Voyager One and Voyager Two were sent on their way, and over the next decade flew as planned past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, providing beautiful images and invaluable data. Ten years ago, they left the solar system and are now in interstellar space, virtually out of power as the solar energy source dwindles in the rear view mirror, but still transmitting and amazingly, even at a distance of 18 billion km, the little antennae can still pick up signals from earth. Despite hurtling along at 500 million kilometres a year, it will still be another 42,000 years before Voyager 2 comes ‘close’ to another star, and nearly 250,000 years before it approaches the star Sirius On their current paths, both probes will still be heading outward across the galaxy for eons to come and perhaps long after our star and its planets die in four or five billion years’ time.

On dark, crisp winter nights whether I was running home from the pool as a teenager, or these days, jogging along pavements as a veteran triathlete, I can’t help myself gazing at the southern sky. My eyes will find the distinctive, never changing, constellation of Orion and follow the belt diagonally. Upwards takes me past Aldebaran, a bright star with a faint red tinge, the eye of the bull in the constellation Taurus, and then further on to the smudgy, wispy cluster of the Pleiades. Next,I’ll follow the belt diagonally downwards to find the shining, bluish star just above the horizon. This is Sirius, the brightest star we can see from earth. I know that somewhere between me, looking outwards from my vantage point in England on Planet Earth, and the distant Sirius I can see in the night sky, the little spacecraft is continuing to forge its lonely path.

Just think about it: About the size of a wheelie-bin, Voyager might be the first object from earth that encounters an intelligent alien life-form; the only emissary of our planet Earth and its human inhabitants.

So just in case, it has an embossed plate on the side carrying a ‘Hello, anybody there message?’ on a gold-plated audio-visual disc which contains photos of the Earth and its life-forms, a range of scientific information, spoken greetings from the people (e.g. the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the United States, (very representative!) and the children of the Planet Earth) and a medley, ‘Sounds of Earth’, that includes whale song, a baby crying, waves breaking on a shore, and a collection of music, including works by Mozart and Chuck Berry's ‘Johnny B. Goode’.

What on earth will ET make of that?

I wish I was a space man, the fastest guy alive

I'd fly you round the universe in Fireball XL-5

Way out in space together, conquerors of the sky

My heart would be a fireball, a fireball

Every time I gazed into your starry eyes.

We'd take the path to Jupiter, and maybe very soon

We'd cruise along the Milky Way and land upon the Moon

To our wanderlust of stardust we'll zoom our way to Mars

My heart would be a fireball, a fireball

If you would be my Venus of the stars.

Barry Gray